Monthly Archives: October 2013

Triangles are my favourite shape. They have three points where two lines meet. Two opposing forces heading towards the same destination. Ichi The Killer triangulates us with its primary characters, two assassins who respond only to pain, but in very different ways.

The concept of stitching people butt-to-mouth was based on a joke that Tom Six once shared with his buddies about punishing child molesters. For the sake of the film’s sanctity, I’d much rather believe that he was just insane or underwent severe trauma as a child.

Calvaire is just about watchable thanks to the exquisite cinematography and sylvan set designs. Shot in the Belgian province of Lièg, the film begins at a lethargic pace with its protagonist, a lounge singer, lost in an obscure village after a car breakdown. The village is obviously filled with psychopathic people and hence the young man is faced with all sorts of hideous propositions.

The film starts as a generic showdown between cops and gangsters before zombies show up, turning it into the bastard child of Towering Inferno and Day of the Dead; just replace the tall building in San Francisco with the France’s dingiest crack-house and George Romero with one of his proteges. The body count and bullet spray are just as befuddled as they are slickly executed.La Horde is no moody psychological study about the undead; just a balls-super-glued-to- the-wall zombie apocalypse thriller.

People stay online for hours in hope that someone will find them sexually attractive. That seems to be the main agenda no matter what they do. They go to extraordinary lengths to appear alluring to those within their sexual demography. Sheitan reminds me of these kids with its characters as caricatures of age-old cliches. Sexually-repressed students, sex-crazed psychopaths and very sexy French women with very very sexy accents to accentuate their even sexier double-entendres.